Art & Technology #3: Olafur Eliasson

Born of Technology

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  While a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Eliasson once went backpacking around Iceland, “the land of fire and ice.” The artist was captivated by the grand panoramas of the north, the active volcanoes, glaciers, geysers and snowstorms. It was there that he discovered the recurring motifs for his work. Eliasson’s art at times seems to be in homage to Aristotle’s four classical elements of earth, water, air and fire. His work is oriented on the elements of nature and the environments in which they manifest. Water, moss and ice are materials frequently found in his installations. Eliasson quickly developed an interest in phenomena experienced within the physical realm that moves into the metaphysical.
  
  Many of his earlier works were an extension of his interest in the compositional elements of nature. One of his most notable was Beauty (1993), a hose punctured with small holes, spraying a curtain of fine mist from a darkened ceiling. A spotlight, shining through at an oblique angle, created a serene rainbow. For the visitors passing through the iridescent curtain, it was a tactile experience, the glimmering rainbow across the cool, moist air reminiscent of the northern lights before it vanished an instant later.

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  The early work Moss Wall (1994) was comprised of moss woven across wire mesh. As the moss was watered, its shape and color changed in the fashion of an abstract painting. Your Strange Certainty Still Kept (1996) dripped water from another perforated hose, similarly mounted from a dark ceiling. In this work, however, the presence of strobe lights made each illuminated moment of falling droplets appear to be frozen in time.
  
  Eliasson uses scientific principles and tools to amplify or create surrealistic iterations of nature. Green River was first carried out in 1998 in Bremen, Germany, then in five other locations including Los Angeles (1999), Stockholm (2000) and Tokyo (2001). Uranine, a water-soluble dye, was poured into rivers in urban and rural settings, turning the rivers green. Carried along by the currents, the dye radically changed the appearance of the rivers and their surroundings. Reception varied in extremes depending on the location, and was accompanied by extraordinary public debate. Double Sunset (1999) featured a yellow corrugated metal disc, erected on scaffolding on top of an industrial building in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Monochromatic floodlights lit up the disc at dust, creating an eerie, decadent illusion of a second sunset alongside the actual image. The New York City Waterfalls (2008) was a large -scale, temporary installation featuring the four namesake located in the East River. An at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, Lava Floor (2002) invited visitors to walk over several tons of igneous Icelandic rock, with the lava sludge laid out on the floor. The smoke rising from the surface recreated the unusual sensation of traversing an actual volcanic area.